I suppose if I land this job @ a
blogging company, I better drink the kool-aid and write about my life
(regardless if I have an actual audience besides my previous bed
partners or immediate friends; word to Internet spying). Matt
Westervelt of SeattleWireless.net will be proud, I've now
joined the cult of wiki's AND blogging I will note however, in late
1998 I wrote my own online journal. First in paper form, then edited
while converting to HTML. I made my own custom background (tiled
picture of my sloppy handwriting), took pictures and even posted
replies from friends (mostly my teenage peers I was chasing after);
bummer I didn't see the business model before my eyes! I stopped the
journal after a year or so, mostly cause my parents finally
discovered it and that was all to weird (ie: now they'd know why I
was stumbling in the house @ 4am).
In typical start-up style (amazing to
behold in 2004) the offices were packed with random computer bits,
people working in hallways and no available conference rooms. The
operations guy and I spoke for well over an hour @ the local
Starfunks. Coffee is slightly drinkable with white chocolate
flavoring (anyone know the Starbucks language for douple flavoring?).
In a oh-so-common occurrence, we happened to have worked @ the same
dot bomb (introducing Matt's law: all tech workers in the Bay
Area are always less the 2 degrees of separation from their peers; 1
degree if you're female; Orkut, Tribe or whatever
social-networking-site-of-the-week will prove this). Many of the
architecture and economical flaws aren't
being duplicated with this company, woo hoo! They appear to be
fairly “lean-n-mean”, even with a the taint of VC funding (*boo
hiss from the peanut gallery*), which doesn't really matter to me.
Similar to previous gigs, I'd be
positioned as the “IT guy / SysAdmin / Network Engineer”. I tend
to enjoy this role, in theory it would have minimal repetitive tasks
and growth to learn new skills. The opportunity
to spread the gospel of BSD, VoIP and BGP appears to be
available, nice bonus! My conversation with the co-founder went
fairly well. I attempted to “up sell” myself, but it's so
difficult to know where to draw the line (“Yes, I'm really good @
xyz, whoops, I've said this four times already”). He already did
some initial background work, finding an old newspaper biography
of me online and a glance of my resume (I think we're only 3 years
apart in age). I was glad to hear many avenues exist to make money
for the company, all of which are doing well - “We're popular in
Japan”; always a good sign.
I didn't have a firm answer for “What
sort of compensation are you looking for?”; better then non-profit
pay ($55k/yr), not so hip on lots of stock (considering they already
have >40 employees, doubtful the strike price' will be worth it,
nor has stock ever worked out for me in the past) and certainly
flexible work hours. I sure hope they extend an offer to me; the ops
guy seemed sold, not sure about the founder. Would be kinda a
bummer, I would only have had a week of slacking/jobless'ness. Need
to study up on Fedora, go tree..err I mean Penguin huggers.
Pros:
Cons:
Core offering built on Perl (while
one can knob turn to scale this somewhat, it doesn't much after
awhile; in the dot com days this meant the exit strategy was
clearly sell the company/ignore the problem before porting to C;
having a mod_perl guru on staff should alleviate this problem)
Office location requires atleast
two separate public transit providers, though they're moving to SoMa
in two weeks (good for my commute, bad for bad luck of the area)
